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The main event! It's been a couple of weeks now! So a bit of a delayed update because I have been up to all sorts of things. The news on powerlifting is that I did get to my meet! I made weight (hoorah!) by cutting a couple of kilos, then I did the competition, and because I knew that I would likely not be able to update my blog straight away, I made a little video to summarise how the competition went. [TLDW, I totalled 230kg, which is less than my gym PR, but I'm pretty happy considering. There were hiccups...] Here's a couple of quick videos (kindly recorded by Ryan from Kernow Gym ). My second squat, with extra angry lockout, and my third deadlift. The one that didn't get away. This is my second squat @ 72.5 after my first @ 70 was disqualified. I was pretty annoyed at that, which probably accounts for the fast lockout 😂😂 A post shared by Claire Salem (@firelotusfitness) on Oct 16, 2017 at 11:04am PDT I like deadlifts, de

Meet minus 48 hours..... Well this is weird. My meet is happening in just a couple of days and I feel oddly underprepared because I haven't done anything for a week! I'm a dancer , and when I have a dance performance to prepare for, the last week is a frenzy of preparation, costume adjustments, last minute rehearsals . I might not even have decided on my music until a week out! Powerlifting is very different. I've heard it said that the reason why lifting meets are so supportive and non-competitive is that the winner is decided in training, not on meet day. I peaked (hit my heaviest lifts) in the penultimate week of my programme. Then I had a week of taper, where I trained with substantially lighter weights and less sets, followed by a week of deload. On Monday this week I tested my openers - the first weight I will attempt to lift on the day, a weight I know I will definitely nail - the rest of the week has been walking and yoga. My only other intensive exe

I wanted to address a question today that keeps coming up on various hypermobility and EDS forums that I frequent. It comes up so often in fact that I feel like I have to write this all up in one place, to save me 1000s of key strokes of individual responses and distil some of my opinions and thought processes on the matter. It always goes like this. Someone asks a question like "I've just been diagnosed with hypermobility, I've been told I can't do yoga anymore..." The responses are always a mixture of "yes, my doctor/physio told me yoga was the worst thing I could do for my hypermobility" and "I do yoga and it's been the best thing for my hypermobility". So what gives? Well, I'm firmly in the "yoga is useful" camp, and I have to disclose that. I'm a yoga practitioner of around 20 years and a perinatal yoga teacher , as well as a personal trainer and bendy person. While I have the deepest respect for the medic

I've been thinking a lot recently about what it takes to put all this body positive stuff into action, as a trainer . So I thought I would share some thoughts because that can be useful. It's something I am very mindful of, when I talk to clients, or when I write about what I do, and I thought it might be helpful to break some of it down, for my own reference. Like ground rules if you will. Not because rules are essential, but because having a clear "policy" on these things makes it easier - the less individual decisions I have to make in a day, the better my day is! So here goes. 1. Never assume that a potential client wants to change the way their body looks. It's a super-easy trap to fall into. If someone who is not particularly lean approaches a trainer for nutrition advice, statistically, they probably wanted to know about fat loss. We meet so many people who want to know about that, it becomes a reflexive response. But it also sniffs a little of som